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Media Contacts

Dr. Richter practices in Montpelier, Vermont. She is a former President of PNHP. She has spoken extensively to both community and medical groups, is a frequent spokesperson in the print, TV, and radio media, and is active in coalition building on the need for universal access to health care.

Dr. Carey attended the University of Vermont College of Medicine and completed her residency in Family Medicine at University of Vermont. Upon completing her residency, she joined the Family Medicine Department at UVM and for fifteen years created and directed the Community Medicine and Prevention Programs of the department’s residency. She has done research on views of Residents on single-payer healthcare as well as collaborative research on Adolescent Substance Abuse as well as development of a Patient Decision Making Aid for Prediabetes. She is a former chair of the Vermont Physicians for a National Program chapter while practicing family medicine in a rural practice in the Champlain Islands near Burlington, Vermont. Dr. Carey has been a member of PNHP since 1990.

Dr. Jason Kelley is an internist at the White River Junction Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Vermont where he serves as chief of the hospital medicine division. He received his medical degree from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School, and did residencies at the Harlem Hospital Center/Columbia University and at the University of Vermont. He is a professor emeritus from the University of Vermont and is currently a visiting professor at Dartmouth Medical School. From 2001 through 2010 he served as vice chairman of the Department of Medicine at the University of Louisville and chief of medicine at the Louisville VA Medical Center. He joined PNHP in 1992 and served as the Vermont chapter president from 1994-1997.

Dr. Malek received his medical training at SUNY Upstate in Syracuse, NY, residency training at Cook County Hospital, and has spent most of his career in community medicine, providing care to underserved populations. He is the recipient of a Kellogg Foundation grant which he used to to pursue advanced training in the field of health policy at Harvard School of Public Health.

He currently practices internal medicine at Central Vermont Hospital, where he provides medical consultation and intensive care to hospitalized patients.

Frustrated by the timidity of the legislation that was enacted in Vermont in 2006, he ran for Lieutenant Governor of Vermont that year and for State Rep this year, hoping to work on the health care issue.

Marvin remains active on the issue of health reform. He has testified before the legislature and given talks around the state advocating for a more humane and affordable health care system.

Vermont State News

By Anna Carey, M.D. | VTDigger.org
A 60-year-old man, who I’ll call C.C., recently walked into my family medical practice. The nurse handed me a thin chart record. His last visit was five years before for a skin infection. Written across the top in large block letters were the words, “NO INSURANCE.”

By Ellen Oxfeld | Rutland (Vt.) Herald
Gov. Peter Shumlin’s decision to suspend moving forward on the financing package for single payer in the coming legislative session does not mean that the dream of health care as a public good in Vermont is dead.

By Morgan True | VTDigger.org
Alissa Carberry, 24, is an early childhood educator working at a nonprofit in Burlington’s Old North End. She has type 1 diabetes and employer-sponsored health insurance from Vermont Health Connect.

By Lisa Rathke | The Times Argus (Barre & Montpelier, Vt.)
MONTPELIER, Vt. (AP) — Supporters of a plan to make Vermont the first state in the country to enact a single-payer health care system urged Gov. Peter Shumlin and the Legislature on Tuesday to move forward with the overhaul, despite Shumlin’s close call in the November election.

By Morgan True | Vtdigger.org
MONTPELIER, Vt. -- For many observers, Rep. Mike Fisher's defeat in the Addison 4 district came as a surprise, and as a rebuke of Vermont's push for single-payer health care.

By Ellen Oxfeld | Rutland (Vt.) Herald
In his Aug. 24 column, Middlebury’s outgoing state Rep. Paul Ralston raises some questions about the state’s road map to single payer. However, his conclusions are based on assumptions that need more probing.

By Michael Ollove | Stateline, The Pew Charitable Trusts
BERLIN, Vt. – Dr. Marvin Malek has been yearning and advocating for a publicly financed, single-payer health care system for at least two decades. Now, as Vermont stands on the threshold of being the first state to launch such a plan, he’s confessing to trepidation.

By Ellen Oxfeld | Rutland (Vt.) Herald
In his recent column on health care (June 29), John McClaughry criticizes Vermont’s road map to universal health care as laid out in Act 48. This road map hopes to create a publicly financed health care system, in which health care is a guaranteed public good for all Vermonters The target date for implementation is 2017.

By G. Richard Dundas, M.D. | Bennington (Vt.) Banner
We read in the Banner that as many as 40 veterans may have died in Phoenix because they could not get needed care at the VA hospital. This is truly outrageous (surely an overused adjective but probably better than disgraceful). We must do better for our veterans.

By Geoffrey Cowley | MSNBC
BURLINGTON, Vermont—Al Gobeille is not your garden-variety health advocate. For the past two decades, he and his wife have hawked fried clams, liquor and ice cream on the Lake Champlain waterfront. He’s a big man with an impish grin and a can-do spirit rooted in an earlier career as a military officer.

By Molly Worthen | The New York Times
When most liberals hear the words “third party,” they have nasty flashbacks to Ralph Nader’s spoiler campaign in 2000. The history buffs among them might think of the populist Greenback Party’s feckless protests against the gold standard in the 19th century or the five presidential campaigns of the Socialist Eugene V. Debs — the last of which, in 1920, he ran from prison.

By Ellen Oxfeld | Rutland (Vt.) Herald
This week in a Vermont Public Radio interview, Senate President Pro Tem John Campbell backed away from an unwavering commitment to the historic task set out in Act 48 — creating a publicly funded guaranteed health care system for all Vermonters.

By Peter Hirschfeld | Vermont Public Radio
The fight for single payer health care promises to be one of the heaviest political lifts in state history. And a new group is about to put some financial weight behind the lobbying push.

By Peter Hirschfeld | Vermont Public Radio
The state’s largest union is throwing its weight, and its money, behind the push for single-payer health care. And the move by the Vermont teachers union lends considerable strength to what will be the heaviest political lift of Gov. Peter Shumlin’s career.

By Hamilton E. Davis | VPR News
From the opening days of Gov. Peter Shumlin’s single payer health care initiative, House Speaker Shap Smith has been a rock-solid supporter of the campaign. In 2011, he delivered Act 48, arguably the most far-sighted health care reform blueprint in the country, by lining up his huge Democratic house majority behind it.

So we support Gov. Shumlin, we are glad he gave this talk to Dartmouth graduate students (“Shumlin: Timing Is Key for Single Payer,” front page, Jan. 28), and we look for their understanding and help as we organize health care providers in Vermont to stay the course and work with us toward a health care system such as others in Western democracies already benefit from.

By Darshak Sanghavi, M.D., and Sarah Bleiberg | KevinMD blog
While the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, has been criticized by its opposition as “socialized medicine,” it relies heavily on private health insurance. On the other end of the political spectrum is the idea that a government-run single payer system, similar to Canada’s, is the best way to deliver health care.

By Chris Fleisher | Valley News (White River Junction, Vt.)
HANOVER, N.Y. — The biggest challenge in moving Vermont toward a single-payer health care system is time, while the political will to achieve it still exists at the state and federal levels, Gov. Peter Shumlin said Monday.

By Peter Hirschfeld | Vermont Public Radio
Vermont lawmakers are at a critical juncture in their quest for a publicly financed health care system. And they’re bringing aboard a $10,000-a-month consultant to help them get it right.

By Peter Hirschfeld | Vermont Public Radio
In an extraordinarily rare appearance by a sitting governor before a legislative committee, Gov. Peter Shumlin Tuesday took responsibility for problems on the new health insurance exchange, but said the shortcomings only reinforce his case for a publicly financed, universal health care system.

By Dave Gram | Modern Healthcare
As states open insurance marketplaces amid uncertainty about whether they're a solution for healthcare, Vermont is eyeing a bigger goal, one that more fully embraces a government-funded model.

By Ellen Oxfeld | Times Argus (Barre & Montpelier, Vt.)
The headline of your Sept. 5 article states, “Shumlin to rely on payroll tax hikes” to fund single payer. However, this headline would be equally accurate if it stated, “Gov. Shumlin to implement the largest single premium decrease in U.S. history.”

By Peter Hirschfeld | Vermont Public Radio
Gov. Peter Shumlin said increases in the payroll tax will “play a major role” in the public financing system he wants to use to fund single-payer health care.

By Ethan Parke | Solutions
In 1998, Dr. Deb Richter began, almost single handedly, to revive the dream of universal health care in the United States — open to all and paid for by the government. A primary care physician from Buffalo, New York, Richter had become outraged by the barriers to accessing quality health care in the city’s low-income communities.

By Andrew Stein | Vtdigger.org
Gov. Peter Shumlin put Vermont on a path to creating the nation’s first single payer health care system when he signed Act 48 in 2011. But since then, his administration has made little progress up that mountain, drawing questions and accusations from the far political left and right about the governor’s sincerity.

By Laura K. Grubb, M.D. | The New England Journal of Medicine
In May 2011, Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin signed legislation to implement Green Mountain Care (GMC), a single-payer, publicly financed, universal health care system. Vermont's reform law passed 15 months after the historic federal Affordable Care Act (ACA) became law. In passing reforms, Vermont took matters into its own hands and is well ahead of most other states in its efforts to implement federal and state health care reforms by 2014.

By Leslie Wright | Vermont Life
In May 2011, Gov. Peter Shumlin signed legislation that set the state on a path toward its own brand of health care, a made-in-Vermont “single-payer” system that would leave no Vermont resident without insurance. Many hurdles remain, but the target date is 2017. If successful, the plan would be the first of its kind in the country and a historic change in the way health care is delivered in the United States.

By Vermont Health Care for All
The Shumlin administration presented a report on financing single payer to the legislature on January 24, 2013. It once again demonstrates that we can have comprehensive health care coverage for every Vermonter and also achieve substantial savings when federal law allows us to implement a single payer system in 2017.

By Andrew Stein | Vtdigger.org
Gov. Peter Shumlin recommended two fiscal measures to the Legislature on Thursday that would mitigate rising health care costs, but would not prevent hikes for lower-income Vermonters.

By Andrew Stein | Vtdigger.org (Montpelier, Vt.)
The Shumlin administration released two financing plans Thursday evening: one for funding a publicly financed health care system and another to pay for portions of the state’s new health benefit exchange.

By Marvin Malek, M.D. | Times-Argus (Barre, Vt.)
Kudos to the grant writers at Vermont’s Dept. of Health Access for obtaining $156 million from the federal government to assist with the implementation of the health exchange, the new insurance marketplace scheduled to go online in October 2013 as part of Obamacare.

By Walter Carpenter | Burlington Free Press
I would like to endorse the Burlington Free Press’s endorsement of single-payer in Aki Soga’s editorial, “Give single-payer a try” (Sept. 28). As Mr. Soga suggested, Vermont has to move forward rather than backward and to finally come to grips with how health care is for us, the people, and not to benefit the profit margins of health insurance corporations, as it is now and which Sen. Brock’s plan would almost certainly enhance.

By Peggy Anna Carey, M.D. | Vtdigger.org
Fletcher Allen Health Care and Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center have formed their new accountable care organization (ACO) called OneCare Vermont. The stated vision is “a statewide network with a coordinated clinical model and toolset … to enhance the quality of the care provided to Vermont’s Medicare beneficiaries while remaining good stewards of health care expenditures …”